He also apparently made a pact with a Staph infection to spare his life. In return, he promised to make it immortal-by turning it into an Archon of the Outer Church. Maybe someone should suggest my theory to him...

a. George Bush, Jr. lied about the invasion of Iraq.Therefore GWB is a bad man.b. 9/11 was a horrible event. If GWB is a bad man and a liar, then 9/11 was an inside job.c. Here are all the bad camera angles and misread or outright falsified evidence that proves it.

I don't have a link on me, and I haven't checked it out yet, but Who Killed The Electric Car? looks like an interesting one to watch, too.

I have a friend who teaches at a school for race car mechanics, and has worked at raceways and been in the industry for a number of years, and he told me within the industry, the suppressed truth behind the GM produced EV-1 was to avoid a liability lawsuit because there was a universal fail point that would cause the car to randomly catch fire.

That is not in the movie, of course, because it would contradict the theory that it was LE EVEL OIL COMPANEEZ

That is not in the movie, of course, because it would contradict the theory that it was LE EVEL OIL COMPANEEZ

I don't doubt that was the reason for the specific recall (which is unhappy, but hardly the only point of the movie), but the larger reason there's no electric car today from GM is that the companies involved managed to get the California Air Resources board to reverse their Zero Emission's policy plan, so the companies no longer needed to comply.

One of my favourites comes from 50 Things You're Not Supposed To Know, from Russ Kick:

In 2002, The US military, spearheaded by the Defense Science Board, proposed the creation of a military unit called the Proactive Pre-Emptive Operations Group, or P2OG. The goal of the P2OG would be to provoke terrorist attacks, and then catch them in the act.

This leads to the obvious questions: what if they didn't catch the terrorists and the attack went unhindered? What about public safety? Etc etc.

Kick's stuff is generally exhaustively researched, and this is no exception; there are a number of articles quoted in the back of the book regarding this proposal. He writes the chapter like the group already exists, which seems a little conspiracy-theory to me. Proposal, yes. Implementation? Doubtful.

Also, @Steven Hutton; in the same book, Kick documents the existence of electric cars about 20 years before gas-powered vehicles. So there's some support there. (I've always wondered, though -- if electric cars are produced with the intention of charging them during "low-demand periods" like late at night, what are we going to do if/when everyone has one... ?)

Like I said, that's what he told me. I never claimed to have an answer, but you'll notice that that specific explanation is missing from the film...if it were really that flimsy, why wouldn't they argue it down?

Probably more because they're incompetent, rather than anything to do with the validity of the argument.

@XIbalba2012: Your mention of the Gulf of Tonkin reminds me of another reason why I think conspiracy theories are made: when you consider that the Vietnam War was pretty much proven to be started on a lie, and after you hear some of the wierd shit that the CIA has admitted doing during the 50s-70s and all of this, it wouldn't be all that hard for people to think that these theories are true, because, well, look at what else has been proven to be true.

I'm surprised none of the Greg Palast/voter caging/election shit has come up yet. It's my "favorite" in that it's been validated pretty clearly (especially if you follow Palast's work at all) and has directly fucked my country and world up in a very real, verifiable way as a result. But yeah.

Corrupted Presidential Elections. There's my vote for a favorite. Depressing in its lack of fantastical ridiculousness.

@ Reynolds: You are more right than you know, I think. I don't know what kind of exposure you have to American coverage of the Presidential Run over in the U.K. but listen to some of the nonsense that's been poured into my ears: "Barrack Obama is a secret Muslim." Even if he was Muslim, so what. I've been lead to believe that our country was founded on a "Freedom of Religion" concept(ok, yea, freedom so long as your were Protestant. Catholics, Jews, and any others were outcasts).

Katie Curick was quoted as saying to Barrack Obama, just after he had won the nomination, and I quote: "Can you see Hilary as your VP, or do you look at her and just think Ugh?" That's right. "Ugh" Is that what my country passes for professional journalistic jargon? "Ugh?" That's not a word Katie...it's a sound made by bubbleheaded simpletons.

@DarkKnightJRK: You are also, absolutely correct, sir. Every war was based on a lie. I think we should stop calling these "conspiracy theories" and calling them "sneaky shit the powers that be pull not only behind our backs, but right in front of us. Sometimes even tricking us into Demanding they chip our basic freedoms away.

@Keeper of Many Names: yes I have seen the Zeitgeist movie. And I'm sure it has it's own bias' peppered in there something good. But, as you say, they make some compelling points. Should I post the links for the Zeitgeist movie here for all to see, or would I be wasting space?

I love, love, love Majestic-12. It's great on its own, but it also fits in beautifully with Danny Cassolaro's Octopus, and the Aquarian forces, all the way up to Marvel Whiteside Parsons and Crowley's Babylon Working madness. King Kill 33 is also mind-blowingly horrifying.

Brendan...hasn't every major breakthrough in the history of humankind been initiated by madmen? DaVinci, Gallieo, VIncent Van Gough, Sigmund Freud, Shakepere, the list is endless. Hell, even Al Gore, and he has a Nobel Prize, which is a Madman's prize to begine with. Wasn't the first Nobel Prize awarded to the person(s) who invented dynamite? We've all heard the saying "there's a fine line between insanity and genius." This leads me to believe that those who are "plainly nuts" are infact so deep into genius, that normal folk don't know how to connect with them, and thus label the "nutters." Einstein suffered frequent bouts of depression, Abe Lincoln suffered some sort of Mental Illness (though the exact condition, I am not aware of, until I look it up later.\ In conclusion: It's the so called "crazy" people we should be listening to, rather than those who have absolute definitions of life and reality, who are conceitedly ignorant of the notion that the Universe just might have other ideas.You said it yourself, Brendan: 9 out of 10 accuraccy rating for pointing out peoples who allow their "reptilian" brain faculties to override their their mammillian ones. Post Script: I'm happy you used the term "lizard brain beasts," which implies, while not necessarily shape-shifting snake-men from beyond our solar system, but rather those individuals, who rule our world, choosing to ignore human emotion in liu of cold blooded attitudes towards life. And wether they be alien snake people or not, they still engage in Druidic, Luciferian practices, and are themselves convinced that they are snake-people.

Which brings me to another topic. The Colombine type kids. My theory is they are, in fact, brilliant children, who cannot connect with their dimwitted peers, and are unable to be guided possitively by incompetant school systems, who belive in absurd concepts like "normalcy." Very small wonder they grow introverted to the point where their bottled up hatred eventually explodes in violent attacks on everyone around them. Not that I approve of their actions mind you. I find it appauling, but I blame the systems that groom them just as much as I blame the perpetrators themselves. If these Kids focused their anger in creative, artistic ways, weather it be writing, drawing, painting, composing music, they'd have a constructive outlet for their anger. Now let's look at the systems' solution towards these kids who shoot up their schools. THey actually ban creativity, and further rob their students of individuallity, by making them wear uniforms. Bad enough they try to make everyone think alike, but now they have them look alike as well, further robbing them of their individuallity, stifiling independant thought. Do you not think, this is the sort of crap that causes these kids to go ballistic to begin with? Not that this is neccessarrilly a conspiracy in itself, mind you, but more evidence of the ineptitude of a scholastic system that has made no progress whatsoever since the days of Confusious

I'm extremely tempted to correct everything I see wrong in those last few comments, Xbalba, but it'd get off-topic and potentially rude. That said, I'll just put this out there: if you don't understand the value of "normalcy", it's simple. A normally-developed personality, that's met appropriate benchmarks in ability and thought, primarily the ability to healthily socialize, will lead to a person that lives within the confines of standard societal behavior. That's normal. If you think that's a bad thing, you're not into psychology then. Abnormal means Columbine. Abnormal means killing cats because you never learned empathy for other living things. Abnormal is bad. It's not really about creative self-expression at all, or stifling it; it's more about being capable of authentic human connection. That's normalcy, and it's stupid to criticize promoting it.

I'm sympathetic to your inclination, fella. One thing I've hard to learn at great personal cost is the ability to disconnect and let someone be wrong on the internet. You're never going to save everyone, so sometimes you just need to disengage.

I will say that the "Mayan Calendar ends in 2012" meme has fucking bugged me since they put it in the Shadowrun RPG back in the day, and now, in 2008, it's only getting worse. At this point, my only chance to save myself is to go back in time and kill Terrence McKenna before he took a break from talking about self-transforming machine elves to somehow inject this idea into the mainstream. It's starting to show up in goddamn news programs as color commentary, and transiently existing in wikipedia before someone stomps on it, I don't know why the idea is so attractive, but at this point it's almost received wisdom.

Harry Goldgar was quite a character. I met him just around the time the White House had closed off Pennsylvania Avenue to vehicular traffic (which was practically an ingraved invitation to any interested party to stand in the street wearing a sandwichboard sign advertising your con). His sign read "Free Harry Goldgar!" Okay, I'll bite "Who's Harry Goldgar?" I asked. "I am." He said. He proceeded to tell me all about medical experimentation, transparent thoughts and how everyone else could read his mind. The theme to Oliver Stone's JFK rolling through my mind as I eyed the White House behind him.

One of my fave all time conspiracies is one I heard way back in 1991 in Roswell, N.M. Keep in mind that this is pre-X-files Roswell stuff before media overkill made it a household name. There was a guy who ran a video store on the outskirts of town called "Outta Limits" and the had a tiny UFO t-shirt and book shop inside the video store. That was all the town had at that time, no museum or anything playing up the incident, just this one dude who had all the dirt. Really damn cool. Anyway, one aspect of the crash story that drew mad speculation from the government was that after the crashed disc was recovered no power source could be located. It was speculated that when the saucer blew up the gravity drive reactor caused a space-time rip with different parts of the crash cascading over the earth at different points in time. One bit over Tunguska in 1908, another piece in Roswell in 1947, and the bulk of it to come down on earth at some undetermined point in the future. Everyone in government was really quite freaked at what to do because it was feared that the remaining piece was the antimatter reactor core. And that's why we have so many underground Army bases, to survive a potential antimatter doomsday. What a great fucking video store!

The real kicker for me was getting my wife, then girlfriend, a shirt from the giftshop and years later seeing Frank Black in an interview for his first post-Pixies album wearing the same shirt. Too cool.